The Oxford History of World Cinema

who most deserves consideration in the generally depressing panorama of Italian cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Born in 1945, Amelio began his career working for
RAI television in the 1970s. As a feature film director he
came to public attention with Colpire al cuore ('To strike at
the heart', 1982), one of the few and one of the best Italian
films on the theme of terrorism. Porte aperte ('Open doors', 1990) dealt with the problems of justice in Sicily, but it
was with Il ladro di bambini ('Child snatcher', 1992) that Amelio managed to adjust his refined and almost aristocratic idea of cinema to the needs of an emotional and
painful story poised between sentiment and social
concern and thereby to score a significant popular success.

At the end of 1992, at the instigation of the Turin International Youth Festival of Cinema, a survey of critics,
journalists, and scholars was set up to identify 'five young
directors for the year 2000'. Of the five winners to emerge,
two -- Bruno Bigoni and Silvio Soldini -- live and work in
Milan; a third, Daniel Segre, is based in Turin; and a
fourth, the highly rated young theatre director Mario
Martone whose first film was Morte di un matematico napoletano ('Death of a Neapolitan mathematician', 1992),
works in Naples. Only the Venetian Carlo Mazzacurati,
who has directed three films, lives in Rome, the traditional
home of the greater part of the film world. It may be that
the rebirth of Italian cinema will come from precisely
such a shift away from Rome and towards the decentralized variety with which it began.

Just as the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 has frequently
been called a rehearsal for the Second World War, so Spain's surprisingly rapid transition from Francoism to
democracy can be seen as prefiguring the sudden collapse
of the Cold War paradigm which followed in 1945. Spanish
cinema played an important role in figuring Spain's move
to democracy, not only after Franco's death in 1975, but
in the years preceding it. From the 1950s onwards a hermetically sealed Spain began to be opened to foreign
influence and a new Spanish cinema emerged on the
world scene.

LOOSENING THE BONDS OF DICTATORSHIP

According to historian Stanley Payne ( 1987-8), Spain
underwent a three-stage process of defascistization, which
began when Franco realized that Hitler and Mussolini
would lose the Second World War; was accelerated at
the height of the Cold War ( 1945-57) when Spain began
moving toward the new European democracies whose
resurgence was partially financed by the US Marshall Plan;
and was formalized in the 1960s through a policy of aperturispio ('opening up') that was actively promoted by Franco's new Minister of Information and Tourism, Manuel
Fraga Iribarne. This drive toward liberalization contained
a double irony. First, despite its overtures to ibreign investors, the Francoist regime continued to impose a monolithic culture at home. This contradiction provided a focal
point for film-makers who wanted to create a cinema of
opposition that could project a different image of Spain
both at home and abroad. Yet equally ironically, these
film-makers helped accomplish Franco's goals, especially
when their films won prestigious awards at international
festivals, demonstrating that a modernized Spain was now
capable of generating (and tolerating) an articulate oppositional culture.

These contradictions were dramatized in Bienvenido, Mr
Marshall! ('Welcome, Mr Marshall!', 1952), which was Spain's official entry at the Cannes Film Festival. This
clever satire (co-written by Luis Berlanga and Juan Antonio
Bardem) shows inhabitants of a small Castilian village
competing with other Spaniards for their share of the
Marshall Plan by dressing up as gypsies and matadors,
complete with fake movie sets. This illusion evokes the
espatiolada, a popular genre that promoted regional
images of an exotic Andalusia as a cultural stereotype for
all of Spain. The film exposes the dual address of every
so-called 'national' cinema-a fictional unity imposed at
home at the cost of cultural and regional difference in
order to be successfully promoted abroad as a distinctive
'national' commodity. The villagers do have 'real' needs,
the kind that were then being depicted in Italian neorealist films; yet they turn to Hollywood fantasies which
get them only deeper in debt. In a series of humorous
dreams, we see how they refigure their needs through
foreign movie images they have internalized. The mayor
dreams he is a sheriff in a saloon doing what cowboys

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.